Destruction of L 53

On the morning of 11 August 1918, over the North Sea near the Dutch island of Terschelling, the German naval airship L 53 fell in flames. She was shot down by Lieutenant Stuart Culley of the Royal Air Force, who had taken off in a Sopwith Camel fighter from a flat lighter towed behind the British destroyer HMS Redoubt. The whole crew of the airship, commanded by Eduard Prölss, was killed, 19 men according to most sources. The British chronology of the war noted that she was the last German airship destroyed in the war.

On the evening of 10 August four light cruisers and over a dozen destroyers under Reginald Tyrwhitt sailed from Harwich. They were to reconnoitre the German minefields in the Heligoland Bight. Some of the destroyers were towing lighters with seaplanes, and Redoubt a lighter with the Camel. The British had only recently begun testing this way of taking fighters to sea. Culley had made the first successful take-off from a towed lighter only on 1 August. An aircraft from such a lighter could reach the airships that patrolled the Heligoland Bight at high altitude, beyond the reach of ships’ guns. It was a step further than a year earlier, when a fighter launched from a platform on a cruiser had destroyed L 23.

In the morning, when the airship appeared over the force, Tyrwhitt tried to draw it further out to sea. Culley took off from the lighter and disappeared into the clouds. According to the British official naval history (Newbolt), several dozen minutes later sailors on the ships heard a short machine-gun burst above the clouds. They saw a flame running across the clouds and wreckage falling. It was a quarter to ten. Culley had attacked the airship from below at a height, according to most sources, of about 19,000 feet, almost 6,000 metres. He then ditched beside the ships, and the crew of Redoubt recovered the pilot and the aircraft. The flagship then hoisted, as the title of a painting in the Imperial War Museum collection has it, a signal referring to the seventh verse of hymn no. 224. Culley received the Distinguished Service Order for this victory, and his Camel is now in that museum’s collection in London.

The same day brought Tyrwhitt a painful loss. Six fast torpedo boats (PL) (Coastal Motor Boats) set out to reconnoitre along the coasts of Terschelling and Ameland without air cover, because the windless weather prevented the seaplanes from taking off. They were attacked by over a dozen German aircraft. After a long fight the boats ran out of ammunition and their engines failed. None returned to the force: some fell into the hands of the Dutch, who interned their crews, and the rest sank. Newbolt called the engagement the fastest fight ever fought at sea.

The loss of L 53 was another blow to the German airship service. Six days earlier, during the last raid on England, its commander Peter Strasser had been killed in L 70. L 53 had served since August 1917 and took part in four raids on England. Naval airships did not return over England before the end of the war.